Chancer’s Paradise

Move the fuckers to Salford

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By the time I grumpily stomped from the lounge at about 6.15 last evening, the BBC Six o’clock News had worked its usual spell and made me feel like I’d been anally violated by a grizzly bear who’d run out of lube.

The bulletin having worked its way through the BBC’s palette of PowerPoint effects while patronisingly explaining to me what a recession is, and played a pointless succession of clips of Rupert Murdoch saying nothing helpfully interspersed by Nicholas Witchell consdescending to explain what it was that Rupert Murdoch was not saying anything about, the final straw came while George Alagiah introduced an item about The Great Drought Of 2012.

You see, it rained quite heavily in some parts of the country yesterday.

But the bulk of England is in a drought. Half-empty reservoirs, hosepipe bans, etc.

And those two things BLEW GEORGE ALAGIAH’S TINY MIND.

Clearly, the BBC thinks it’s impossible for there to be a drought (brought about by a sustained, long-term period of low rainfall) alongside a couple of hours of rain.

The BBC almost certainly blames the European Court of Human Rights for “them” taking away our God-given right to water our petunias WHEN THERE’S CLEARLY LOTS OF WATER AROUND SO WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM, BLOODY JOBSWORTHS?

I didn’t wait to hear the “report” on this pressing “news” item, doubtless pointlesly topped and tailed by some poor schmuck in a raincoat who’d been told to drive around at great expense with his cameraman and sound engineer until they found somewhere where it was tipping it down with rain.

I pray that the Chief Executive of British Waterways (or whoever they interviewed for incisive insight and enlightened comment into this incredible phenomemon) replied:

“Two years – almost no rain. One day – heavy showers. Now fuck off, do the job we pay our licence fees for and go and report on what’s happening on South Sudan.”

But as there’s no mention of that on the front page of today’s Daily Mail I have to assume that didn’t happen.

Maybe tonight, eh, George?

How The Guardian loses millions of pounds every year under Alan Rusbridger

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Today is 4 April 2012.

There have been 95 days in 2012 so far.

In 2012 to date The Guardian has run 93 stories that include the phrase “Mad Men”.

Sky Atlantic’s viewing figures for the first three episodes of series five of Mad Men:

  • episode one – 98,000
  • episode two – 45,000
  • episode three – 47,000

There are roughly 60 million people in the UK.

47,000 as a percentage of 60,000,000 is less than 0.08%.

229,000 people bought The Guardian in January 2012 according to the industry circulation figures.

0.08% of 229,000 is 183.

So, adding in the friends and family of each journalist, the almost-daily stream of Guardian articles about Mad Men have been aimed at about 200 people.

No-one likes him: he don’t care

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It’s a very warm welcome back to the Ministry to our favourite religion-hopping, lunatic, crusading war criminal, Mr. Tony Bliar!

From the look of this picture it seems that it took the Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf a very short time indeed to get the measure of this crackpot zealot.

Cunt meets homophobe

Funnily, Bliar was in Liberia to tell the Liberians how to live their lives, just as he liked to tell various sets of little brown people how to live their lives back in the day when people still inexplicably gave half-a-shit about what he had to say.

The more I look at the photograph above the more I laugh. Albeit it’s the kind of mirthless laughter borne of the realisation that it took President Sirleaf mere minutes to come to the same conclusion about this pointy-headed cunt it took a large swathe of the British electorate a full decade to reach.

It’s just a shame she’s a nasty homophobe. Ah, well…

Thanks, anyway, Mr. Tony Bliar, for cheering an old Minister up. May it be years before you darken the doorstep of the Ministry again.

It’s Not Right But It’s Okay (In A Chancer’s Paradise)

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“We all knew she had issues,” said Satan Cowell.

“But we didn’t actually try to do anything about the issues we all knew she had. We just continued to make money off her by dragging her fraying body out as a freak show/guest star every so often for your entertainment so we could sell more advertising space. We played on her issues. We preyed on them. In fact, now I come to think about it I am a despicable cunt. What I’ve become shames and disgusts me. I shall now do the honourable thing and kill myself,” he didn’t continue.

Yet more tragically easy satire

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Do you have one idea to win the next election? The Fabian Fringe at Labour 2011

Labour Party Conference is fast approaching and as with every year we’ll be running one of the largest fringe programmes on offer. Come and join us and our partners in Liverpool Town Hall, just five minutes walk from the Secure Zone. No conference pass is needed to secure attendance.

Do you have one idea to win the next election? If so please submit your ideas to Me and the winner will get to pitch their ideas to our Dragons in this year’s ‘Fabian Dragons’ Den entitled‘One Idea to Win the Next Election’(Sunday at 1pm).

Hazel Blears MP and Mehdi Hasan (Senior Editor New Statesmen, co-author ‘Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader’) will be joined by a special guest to pass judgement on your ideas.

To take part all you need to do is submit your pitch via e-mail and be ready and available to speak at The Fringe event itself. The pitch should be no more than 500 words and a few runners up will have their ideas posted on our prestigious and influential Fabian blog ‘Next Left’.

Posted by Olly Parker – Events Director at the Fabian Society

Er, “ditch Chauncey Gardiner and replace him with someone more credible with the electorate, like Iain Duncan-Smith”?

Now, watch this drive…

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…he’s gone off on his fifth holiday in as many months.
First there was Cornwall back in spring.
Then there was a mini-break to Granada.
Then there was Ibiza.
Then there was Tuscany, where the millionaire eventually remembered to tip the waitress.
And this week he’s gone back to Cornwall.
From whence he has returned to London, briefly, to discuss the end-game in Libya before going back to his beach.
I’d love to say all this gallivanting is doing the nation a disservice, but I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of anything much that would be improved by this man giving it his close attention.
I can’t say I’m completely relaxed about having a Prime Minister paid £142,500 a year to do very little of any worth. I can’t help thinking he’s an Earth version of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Douglas Adams character who was made President of the Universe purely to distract attention from the people who were really in charge.
But I suppose him being utterly disengaged – from the electorate, the nation’s wants and needs, the nuclear button – can only be better than having someone so dim he can’t open a bottle of wine without an embolism actually making decisions on our behalf.

A slowly growing sense of hopelessness and impending doom

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Story #1: London’s burning. Again.

Story #2: The markets are in freefall and various economies are failing. Again.

Story #3: There’s been a massive increase in crime in rural areas since the recession started.

I don’t know what story #4 was on the BBC’s early evening news yesterday because I switched off at that point.

Each of the stories was presented in isolation, with fuck all by way of analysis or thought apart from a flash of Stephanie Flanders’ revolting green skirt.

It’s all linked, of course, and none of it is remotely surprising for those with half-an-inch of long-term memory. It happened in the 80s during a recession. It happened during the 90s in a recession. Just because we didn’t have a recession for 15 years doesn’t mean we should raise an eyebrow that the slash and burn approach to economics adopted by PBD and Gideon have resulted in exactly the same social upheaval that occurred when That Bloody Woman did the same thing three decades ago.

There are only two differences now.

First, rolling news channels have been invented. They’ve got to fill all that airtime somehow. The riots of the 80s just got ten minutes at the start of the evening news bulletin. Now it’s all riots, all the time. Breaking news is the new light entertainment.

Second, our leaders – the people in whom apparently sane and rational individuals were inexplicably prepared to place their trust just over a year ago – were absent. Whatever other flaws she had (and I think she had a couple), you can’t imagine a complete vacuum in Downing Street when That Bloody Woman was in charge. Even Bliar and Arrivederci Gordon realised some bugger had to hold the fort.

Everybody deserves a holiday. Even PBD and Gideon. (Or, more accurately, their families.) But, in real life, everybody in my department is not allowed to go on holiday at the same time. It is shameful beyond comprehension that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London were all on holiday at the same time.

And I notice Chauncey Gardiner was on his hols, too, only deigning to come back from Devon’s Adenoid Extraction Recovery Unit AFTER PBD had announced he was getting on a plane to fly back from Tuscany. That tells you everything you need to know about our Leader (sic) of the Opposition.

What was our Coalition administration’s stunning Plan B while everyone topped up their tans? William Hague and Vince Cable. The former, a man whose leadership credentials have already been roundly rejected by the British electorate in a plebiscite; the latter, a man whose sole achievement over the past 15 months has been to demonstrate his lack of temperamental suitability for ministerial office. It shows how well the Don’t Panic Double Act went that first Nick Clegg, then Theresa May and then finally PBD dragged their sorry arses back to work like a half-hearted zombie invasion.

Gideon remains absent, soaking up the Californian sun. Rome burns but it’s nothing to do with him, guv.

Of course, the real salt is yet to be rubbed into the wound. Wait for it – it’s coming: the emergency police powers. We’re inches away from a police state. But then maybe that’s what our politicians have wanted all along.

And one final thing. What the fuck has this got to do with the Olympics? How many people were murdered in Los Angeles in 1983? Or Beijing in 2007? Grow a fucking pair. If you want to try to shift attention away from the fact that you have wrought this on yourselves by pursuing exclusionary policies, fine. But some of us would have preferred all along if the £9.3 billion or more of public money being spent on the Olympics had been spent pursuing inclusionary policies.

Not for the first time, the Minister quotes with approval Tom McRae:
Rioters of London, remember to leave some real estate standing so mortgage companies have a product to deny you.
I wish the poor shopkeepers luck in claiming on their insurance or getting small business loans. The wrong buildings are on fire.

(Thanks to Radio Nixon for the post title.)

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